I did only a fast skim, but it appears that the company's position is that it doesn't want to cut the benefits of the existing workers, but only avoid adding new workers to the old pension system. However, without that $60m kick-in, it looks like the existing pensions will go bust before the existing workers all die off.

Further, it looks like the company can't afford the $60m and the choice is get out of the obligation or close the plant and move elsewhere. Either way, the workers are screwed.

"Put not your trust in princes" would seem to be the lesson here.

If Trump supporters wanted a tough guy, why did they elect such a whiny bitch? - Mo

“It’s not exactly like ‘us versus them,’ ” said Thomas Hyclak, an economics professor at nearby Lehigh University. “It’s not like management was trying to take jobs and move them to South Carolina. This is a good company.”

Remember, kids, unions and economics professors alike want to make sure that states in the bottom quintile have no way to attract industry from states in the top two quintiles. Only bad companies take the risk of building new infrastructure and new supply chains in shithole states without paying the inexperienced workforce in those states just as much as in the states where the workforce is experienced and the supply chain is more stable. If high-poverty states want these jobs they can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Pennsylvania jobs belong to Pennsylvanians, and South Carolinians need not apply.

"The constitution is more of a BDSM agreement with a safe word." - Sandy

"Neoliberalism. Austerity. Booga booga!!!!" - JasonL

"We can't confirm rumors that Lynndie England is in the running to be Gina Haspel's personal aide." - DAR

“It’s not exactly like ‘us versus them,’ ” said Thomas Hyclak, an economics professor at nearby Lehigh University. “It’s not like management was trying to take jobs and move them to South Carolina. This is a good company.”

Remember, kids, unions and economics professors alike want to make sure that states in the bottom quintile have no way to attract industry from states in the top two quintiles. Only bad companies take the risk of building new infrastructure and new supply chains in shithole states without paying the inexperienced workforce in those states just as much as in the states where the workforce is experienced and the supply chain is more stable. If high-poverty states want these jobs they can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Pennsylvania jobs belong to Pennsylvanians, and South Carolinians need not apply.

If Trump supporters wanted a tough guy, why did they elect such a whiny bitch? - Mo

Reminds me a bit of mom’s history. She was never diagnosed as schizophrenic but definitely had delusions during her manic swings. They were tinged with similar notes. She was a victim of some chosen enemy and she would say and do real world bad things to get what she felt she deserved, often defined in oddly specific ways.

Reminds me a bit of mom’s history. She was never diagnosed as schizophrenic but definitely had delusions during her manic swings. They were tinged with similar notes. She was a victim of some chosen enemy and she would say and do real world bad things to get what she felt she deserved, often defined in oddly specific ways.

Type 1 bipolar?

I think a lot of people don't realize that psychosis can occur in a lot of situations outside of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is non-stop with frequent halucinations, but delusions and psychosis can happen with prolonged drug/alcohol use, severe bipolar or depressive episodes, and high prolonged stress due to milder mental health issues.

"The constitution is more of a BDSM agreement with a safe word." - Sandy

"Neoliberalism. Austerity. Booga booga!!!!" - JasonL

"We can't confirm rumors that Lynndie England is in the running to be Gina Haspel's personal aide." - DAR

“It’s not exactly like ‘us versus them,’ ” said Thomas Hyclak, an economics professor at nearby Lehigh University. “It’s not like management was trying to take jobs and move them to South Carolina. This is a good company.”

Remember, kids, unions and economics professors alike want to make sure that states in the bottom quintile have no way to attract industry from states in the top two quintiles. Only bad companies take the risk of building new infrastructure and new supply chains in shithole states without paying the inexperienced workforce in those states just as much as in the states where the workforce is experienced and the supply chain is more stable. If high-poverty states want these jobs they can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Pennsylvania jobs belong to Pennsylvanians, and South Carolinians need not apply.

It's a bit more complicated than that. A lot of times, moving is just a way to paper over a deeper problem. Example; Boeing is locally famous for perpetually failing to price the cost of developing and maintaining a labor pool into their long-term projections. Back in the 1990s, they decided to move a portion of their new production to Kansas, with the tacit understanding that they wanted to move away from what they saw as unacceptably generous pay schemes in Washington. They got similar tax breaks from the government of Kansas, so everyone at Boeing HQ figured "awesome, should be no problem." But, and this is big, they neglected to note that Washington spends a fortune training people to to essentially do all the jobs Boeing wants done in their factories, up to and including giving Boeing layoff victims preferential treatment in the distribution of retraining funds. And Kansas was both unwilling and unable to do this, arguing, fairly, that they were already giving Boeing the exact deal they promised, and now Boeing wanted more from them. Boeing imagined that they could overcome this by enticing people to move, but people with those skills can move places a hell of a lot nicer than Kansas and get work, so migration doesn't really work as an alternative plan. Eventually, you run out of people willing to move, and you have to have a local plan. And, as a result, Boeing isn't in Kansas anymore, at least not in the numbers they once were. Their new idea is South Carolina, and they're probably going to have an easier time attracting people, for a while. It's a much nicer state, at least in terms of weather. But eventually they're going to run into the same problems they had before. Because they never solved the root issue; their workforce is too skilled to be dispensable, and they never bothered to find something more attractive than those pensions to motivate those workers. Moving operations to solve a problem is almost always a bad idea, unless the problem is "my factory is built on an ancient Indian burial ground." You're just going to take the problem with you.

"VOTE SHEMOCRACY! You will only have to do it once!" -Loyalty Officer Aresen

Depends on what kind of business you are in and where you go. Fin firms like mine have been moving operations and customer service out of the NE to escape labor cost structure for 15 years - and I don’t think you’ll see any of them heading back. We’ve moved south (Boston and Merrimack to Ky, Raleigh, Westlake TX) and now west with our newest big campus in Albuquerque. Competition is doing similar things.

It is true that you are giving up a lot if you were The One Big Deal in a mid sized and up city, but also costs are costs and they tend to be long term problems.

It depends what talent pool you’re looking for low to mid scale, you can move easily. But if you’re looking for skilled labor, location matters. We’ve had to expand from our Ops Center in STL because of how hard it is to get talent there. We’ve been expanding in the expensive AF markets.

his voice is so soothing, but why do conspiracy nuts always sound like Batman and Robin solving one of Riddler's puzzles out loud? - fod

Intelligent and informed people of good will can strenuously disagree about the wisdom of policies that have produced mass incarceration. What is, however, indisputable is that this phenomenon creates an enormous problem of facilitating the reentry into society of released prisoners who were not improved by the experience of incarceration and who face discouraging impediments to employment and other facets of social normality.

I think he and I drastically disagree on the definition of "people of good will" if said people wouldn't take into account the latter when considering the former.

"Never forget: a war on undocumented immigrants by necessity is a war on all of our freedoms of association and movement."

“It’s not exactly like ‘us versus them,’ ” said Thomas Hyclak, an economics professor at nearby Lehigh University. “It’s not like management was trying to take jobs and move them to South Carolina. This is a good company.”

Remember, kids, unions and economics professors alike want to make sure that states in the bottom quintile have no way to attract industry from states in the top two quintiles. Only bad companies take the risk of building new infrastructure and new supply chains in shithole states without paying the inexperienced workforce in those states just as much as in the states where the workforce is experienced and the supply chain is more stable. If high-poverty states want these jobs they can pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Pennsylvania jobs belong to Pennsylvanians, and South Carolinians need not apply.

It's a bit more complicated than that. A lot of times, moving is just a way to paper over a deeper problem. Example; Boeing is locally famous for perpetually failing to price the cost of developing and maintaining a labor pool into their long-term projections. Back in the 1990s, they decided to move a portion of their new production to Kansas, with the tacit understanding that they wanted to move away from what they saw as unacceptably generous pay schemes in Washington. They got similar tax breaks from the government of Kansas, so everyone at Boeing HQ figured "awesome, should be no problem." But, and this is big, they neglected to note that Washington spends a fortune training people to to essentially do all the jobs Boeing wants done in their factories, up to and including giving Boeing layoff victims preferential treatment in the distribution of retraining funds. And Kansas was both unwilling and unable to do this, arguing, fairly, that they were already giving Boeing the exact deal they promised, and now Boeing wanted more from them. Boeing imagined that they could overcome this by enticing people to move, but people with those skills can move places a hell of a lot nicer than Kansas and get work, so migration doesn't really work as an alternative plan. Eventually, you run out of people willing to move, and you have to have a local plan. And, as a result, Boeing isn't in Kansas anymore, at least not in the numbers they once were. Their new idea is South Carolina, and they're probably going to have an easier time attracting people, for a while. It's a much nicer state, at least in terms of weather. But eventually they're going to run into the same problems they had before. Because they never solved the root issue; their workforce is too skilled to be dispensable, and they never bothered to find something more attractive than those pensions to motivate those workers. Moving operations to solve a problem is almost always a bad idea, unless the problem is "my factory is built on an ancient Indian burial ground." You're just going to take the problem with you.

Yeah, there are economic reasons why companies should consider staying put, but at least in the context of the article, that wasn't the message from the commenter. The implication was more along the lines of 'evil capitalists move jobs to South Carolina.'

And Peeps ain't 787s. I've seen this line of reasoning with Boeing and I think there's something to be said for it, but I've also seen it with far more middle-skill manufacturing. And for some reason, even before the Boeing thing, South Carolina was getting singled out. Also, did Boeing move to Wichita, or someplace else? Wichita is a huge aviation industry hub, so it seems like getting an educated workforce shouldn't be as hard as all that. Then again, Wichita State probably isn't up there with ... I assume there are some good universities in the Puget Sound area? I know nothing of U of W, or what other universities are there.

And yeah enticing people to SC is going to be easier than enticing people to KS. The better South Carolina jobs are mostly moving to either greater Charleston or greater Greenville/Spartanburg. One puts you max half-an-hour from some really good beaches, and the other puts you within seeing distance of the Blue Ridge, and an hour from the Blue Ridge Parkway, and both with tons of lakes or rivers for recreational boating and fishing, and national forest land for hunting. For the ones locating to Columbia or other parts of the Midlands, well... you can get to the beach or the mountains in a couple hours, and there's still all the lakes and forest land for hunting, I guess.... but mostly it's cheap.

"The constitution is more of a BDSM agreement with a safe word." - Sandy

"Neoliberalism. Austerity. Booga booga!!!!" - JasonL

"We can't confirm rumors that Lynndie England is in the running to be Gina Haspel's personal aide." - DAR

This is one of the better online speech synthesis tools I've found. It does five different languages and multiple speakers of each even in the free version, and sounds fairly decent.https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/

"Millennials are lazy. They'd rather have avocado toast than cave in a man's skull with a tire iron!" -FFF

A fascinating article about the limitations of DNA forensics. It centers around a murder and robbery that was "solved" through DNA evidence - but it was proven that one of the suspects couldn't have done it, because he had an extremely solid alibi: right around the time the murder was taking place, people had called 911 about the suspect because he was falling-down drunk, the paramedics arrived to collect him, and he was admitted to the hospital.

tl;dr version: No, the honeybees are not all dying off and we are not all going to starve due to lack of pollinators.

Oh, good. I just found out the other day that clover honey is delicious.

"Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
"Cyberpunk never really gave the government enough credit for their ability to secure a favorable prenup during the Corporate-State wedding." - Shem